Various aspects of the present invention relate generally to shortest path bridging networks, and in particular to coupling an auto-attach enabled device to a shortest path bridging network.
Auto attach is a technology allows network devices (typically edge devices) to be able to leverage the features of Shortest Path Bridging (SPB). The edge devices typically can send and receive untagged packets, packets using VLAN encapsulation, or both. However, the edge devices do not have an ability to perform MAC-in-MAC encapsulation. MAC-in-MAC encapsulation uses a Service Instance Identifier (I-SID) as the primary switching transport identifier. I-SIDs have a large domain space when compared to a VLAN domain, by orders of magnitude.